Most Fascinating Challenges to Classic Novels

[livetomorrow16]

Hey guys,

I was just wondering what is the most fascinating challenge you have ever read about classic book? Things that made you re-consider your own views?

For example, I read an article about how The Lord of the Rings was a feminist book (contrary to the popular belief of it being pro-men)


Should be fun .. I have a lot of time on my hands and would love to re-read some books with these different perspectives!


Thanks
Joshua

[JHG]

Hi Joshua,

I experienced something like that with a similar type of book. Dune, the Sci-Fi classic and a personal favorite of my youth, was made very much different by the assertion of a post-colonial intepretation. Add to that some 60s feminism with the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and you have an exposition of modern literary criticism. I can't point you to any specific articles (sorry), but the general ideas are enough to spark a much different reading. Very much changed the book, in some ways better, in some worse.

[ladderandbucket]

Once read a blog which suggested that Ishmael (of Moby-Dick) is not simply an unreliable narrator but a world class fantasist who has never been on a whale ship in his life. In fact he is the sub-sub librarian who introduces the book. He has spent his life reading and dreaming about whales and the whole story is a figment of his imagination.

Can't remember the exact argument for this but I was quite taken with it. There are several scenes in the book which Ishmael couldn't possibly have witnessed and there seems something very suspicious about his retelling of the Town-Ho's story.

[Whosis]

That Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare, which I think is ridiculous. If you can think it reading Shakespeare, why not be the one to have invented it? I should have some good examples from my literature classes, but most people accept the stories straightforward.

[livetomorrow16]

Bump. Cool entries guys. Whosis, I've seen a movie and read a few articles that really stretch imaginations about who Shakespeare was (or 'were'??!)

[Iain Sparrow]

That Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare, which I think is ridiculous. If you can think it reading Shakespeare, why not be the one to have invented it? I should have some good examples from my literature classes, but most people accept the stories straightforward.


Bump. Cool entries guys. Whosis, I've seen a movie and read a few articles that really stretch imaginations about who Shakespeare was (or 'were'??!)


Let me first start off by stating that I am a born skeptic, and therefore tend to not give conspiracy theories the time of day... but, in this case I have to scratch my head, and I'm in some pretty good company...

The great minds who have asked these questions are legion.

Mark Twain, one of the most famous doubters, author of the essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” wrote: “So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.”

“I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction,” wrote novelist Henry James, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”

Sigmund Freud, whose own work is often equated with Shakespeare’s in its cultural impact and who drew heavily on Hamlet for some of his own theories, also believed that someone other than the actor from Stratford wrote the plays. “It is undeniably painful to all of us,” he said, “that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare.”


It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?.. or anything by Shakespeare referencing other literature?

[Cleanthes]

Let me first start off by stating that I am a born skeptic, and therefore tend to not give conspiracy theories the time of day... but, in this case I have to scratch my head, and I'm in some pretty good company..


It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?.. or anything by Shakespeare referencing other literature?

Well, 'they' claim to have found one holograph. Not only that, but it seems like Shakespeare was dyslexic. From Eric Sams' Shakespeare's Hand in the Copy for the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet.
[Our] starting-point must be the only extant Shakespearean holograph [the so-called 'hand D' in the Play of Sir Thomas More], hereafter called More. This excerpt is duly reproduced in facsimile, together with expert commentary, in the Riverside edition. Its clearest characteristic is its intense variability of spelling; thus the word sheriff appears as Shreiff, shreef, shreeve, Shrieue and Shreue, all within five lines.

It is no surprise, then, that Hamlet Q2 exhibits this same feature. Even after extensive compositorial normalisation (inferable from such facts as the replacement of More's 'coold', 'should' and 'woold' by the conventional forms, throughout every edition of all the plays and poems) there are still hundreds of variants and other idiosyncrasies. For example, in addition to the triplets (i.e. three different ways of spelling the same word) Angel/Angell/Angle, Denmark/Denmarke/Denmarke and do/doe/doo, Q2 contains hundreds of doublets, from aloofe/a loofe to you'l/you'le. The plain explanation is that these typical Shakespearean variants have eluded the normalization process[...]

But then what of the very same triplets and doublets, in the identical spellings, throughout [the allegedly concocted from memory by some minor reporting actor] Q1 (not just in its first Act)?[...] Q2 misprints as cost (=cast), and sallied (=sullied) occur because (as More shows) Shakespeare's formation of letter a was often indistinguishable from his o or u. But these same misprints also occur in Q1, which plainly implies the same hand behind both.

[...] Shakespeare's own writing was in the highest degree variable; and the[se] twenty-two lines in question [I.i.58-79] come from different editions of different versions set up by different compositors at different times in different workshops.[...] So the Q2 compositors were evidently not just copying from Q1. Yet almost all the shared words in each Quarto text are identical, including such eccentric spelling and typography as smot (=smote), sleaded (=sledded), pollax (=Polacks), strikt (=strict), cost (=cast), Cannon, forraine (=foreign), ship-writes (=shipwrights), ioynt (=joint). [...]All the variants, are prima facie Shakespearean, thus the variable speech-prefixes, the presence or absence of initial capitals or of final -e, the occasional use of ea for e, or ow for ou, the interchangeability of i and y, the otiose apostrophe and the phonetic spellings, can readily be matched from More and other authentic sources, including Hamlet Q2.

[...] The following selection of Q2 spellings, which (being printed from his autograph) are prima facie Shakespearean, is restricted to items which occur in Acts II-V: advise (=advice), borne (=born), cald (=called), cauiary (=caviare), chuse (=choose), cleere (=clear), eosin (=cousin), deere (=dear), Duckat (=ducat), I (=ay), Iigge (=jig), leasure (=leisure), loose (=lose), magicke, mettle (=metal), mistris (=mistress), musicke, neere (=near), Nemeon (=Nemean), of (=off), penitrable (=penetrable), perdy (=the expletive pardieu), prethee (=prithee), prophecie (=prophesy), spunge (=sponge), sute (=suit), tuch (=touch), yeeld (yield) and so forth. But exactly the same spellings and usages appear in Q1, Acts II-V.

[Marbles]

^

I read somewhere a long time ago that perhaps Francis Bacon might have penned some of the writings attributed to William Shakespeare. God knows what's the truth.

[JanVanHogspeuw]

It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?

Because it was 400 years ago. Even some of his (and others) published work has been lost to history.

[Pierre Menard]

There is absolutely no doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays.

[Emil Miller]

There is absolutely no doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays.

Given the number of times this subject has been aired on the forum, there obviously is some doubt as to whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.

[Pierre Menard]

Not from people with a clue.

[Emil Miller]

Not from people with a clue.

'Such as Mark Twain, Henry James and Sigmund Freud, not to mention a fair number of theater folk.'

I happen to believe that Shakespeare probably did write the plays but I also believe that dogmatism
is no criterion where the search for truth is concerned.

[Pierre Menard]

'Such as Mark Twain, Henry James and Sigmund Freud, not to mention a fair number of theater folk.'

I happen to believe that Shakespeare probably did write the plays but I also believe that dogmatism
is no criterion where the search for truth is concerned.



Great writers, all three. That doesn't mean they're unable to believe in nonsense. There's some great actors that are 9/11 truthers too. Being a good artist doesn't preclude believing in nonsense, nor does it add credibility to nonsense.

[Iain Sparrow]

Great writers, all three. That doesn't mean they're unable to believe in nonsense. There's some great actors that are 9/11 truthers too. Being a good artist doesn't preclude believing in nonsense, nor does it add credibility to nonsense.

No, but it does mean they fully understood what is required to write at the level of a Shakespeare, and thus found it hard to believe that some of the most astonishingly perfect prose in all of literature was penned by someone who could barely keep a coherent business ledger, and appears to have never referenced another writer, play, poem, or anything of a literary nature.

"We have been able to discover, over many generations, about 70 documents that are related to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, but none of them are literary," says Daniel Wright, an English professor who directs the Shakespeare Authorship Research Center at Oregon's Concordia University.

"They all speak to the activity of a man who is principally a businessman; a man who is delinquent in paying his taxes; who was cited for hoarding grain during a famine," Wright adds. "We don't have anyone attesting to him as a playwright, as a poet. And he's the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career."

[JanVanHogspeuw]

And he's the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career."


Even a quick google search would show you how obviously wrong that is.

And yes, he wrote some of the most astonishing literature ever, but it wasn't 'perfect'. He made mistakes that a university educated noble probably wouldn't have, and the plays are consistent with someone who 'hadst small Latin and less Greek' (as his contemporary Ben Johnson, who came from as humble a background, stated in his 'To the memory of my beloved Shakespeare, and what he hath left us') and what's more quite a number of the mistakes he made are unerringly consistent with mistakes made in a book by Thomas Cooper which would have been available at the Stratford grammar school at the time he would been there.

The fact that a few great writers have been taken in by this is no more surprising to me than that the creator of Sherlock Holmes believed in that fairy photo.

[OrphanPip]

It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?.. or anything by Shakespeare referencing other literature?

Paper was expensive and reused extensively, you simply didn't write rough drafts of a play to try it out. Thomas Dekker's handwriting survives only in the manuscript of Thomas Moore, along with Shakespeares, it would only be worth noting a lack of Shakespeare manuscripts if this wasn't normal for playwrights of the period. In fact, there is not a single surviving play manuscript for the works of Kyd, Chapman, Jonson (we have one closet masque surviving in his hand), Beaumont, Fletcher, or Ford. Christopher Marlowe was kind enough to leave us some bits of his writing on a Doctor Faustus manuscript.

It is enough for me that we have plenty of attestations of Shakespeare's authorship from contemporaries, or near contemporaries, like Jonson and D'Avenant. If anyone doubted Shakespeare's authorship at the time they didn't leave a record of it. The authorship question wasn't raised until the 19th century.

[JCamilo]

C''mom, Pip, they are using Mark Twain as a reliable source about Shakespeare. It is almost like someone using Jurassic Park in a class to prove Dinossaurs lived with humans :D

[stlukesguild]

It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?.. or anything by Shakespeare referencing other literature?

WE know for a fact that Shakespeare penned the sonnets attributed to him, as well as the late poems. The quality of these works... especially the sonnets... is more than worthy of the author of the plays. Why are there no hand-written drafts? Money from the theater was earned from the production of the plays. Until Ben Jonson, no one thought to publish plays as a work of literature. Because of a lack of copyright laws, to publish one's plays... or even circulate copies among the actors (who might sell these to competing theatrical houses) was something to be avoided at all costs. Individual actors were given their lines and the lines leading up to their lines, but not the whole play.

The majority of those who fall for the Shakespeare conspiracy theories are those, like our beloved Emile, who could not or cannot believe that an individual not from the upper classes could have become the greatest writer in Western literature. Yes, there is no documentary proof that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him... other than the fact that William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, an actor and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), the playing company that owned the Globe Theatre, the Blackfriars Theatre, and exclusive rights to produce Shakespeare's plays from 1594 to 1642 was identified as the author of said plays in production... and when they were first published by Ben Jonson. Shakespeare's education was no less than that of Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson (or Cervantes for that matter).

In addition to the name appearing on the title pages of poems and plays, his name was given as that of a well-known writer at least 23 times during his lifetime. Several contemporaries corroborate the identity of the playwright as the actor, and explicit contemporary documentary evidence attests that the actor was the Stratford citizen. In 1598, Francis Meres named Shakespeare as a playwright and poet in his Palladis Tamia, referring to him as one of the authors by whom the "English tongue is mightily enriched". He names twelve plays written by Shakespeare, including four which were never published in quarto: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Won, and King John, as well as ascribing to Shakespeare some of the plays that were published anonymously before 1598—Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV, Part 1. He refers to Shakespeare's "sugared Sonnets among his private friends" 11 years before the publication of the Sonnets.

Beyond these, and other facts, none of the arguments in favor of the 80+ other individuals proposed over the years as the authors of Shakespeare's plays have any real convincing evidence... let alone documentation. In the majority of instances, these theories rely upon the most absurd leaps of faith and logic.

[stlukesguild]

Bingo, Pip!:thumbsup: Good hearing from you again.

[stlukesguild]

No, but it does mean they fully understood what is required to write at the level of a Shakespeare, and thus found it hard to believe that some of the most astonishingly perfect prose in all of literature was penned by someone who could barely keep a coherent business ledger, and appears to have never referenced another writer, play, poem, or anything of a literary nature.

Plato attempted to dismiss Homer... who might be far more of a candidate for questionable attribution than Shakespeare. Tolstoy dismissed Shakespeare. Nabokov thought Dostoevsky to be amateurish and overrated. Hemingway and Faulkner dissed each other. It all proves nothing... beyond the fact that even the greatest artists are not infallible... nor do they have infallible taste.

[OrphanPip]

Bingo, Pip!:thumbsup: Good hearing from you again.

I'm around, just busy. I have a part-time appointment as a lecturer at a small college, but it doesn't pay much so I'm working a call centre at nights.

[Emil Miller]

[COLOR="#B22222"]The majority of those who fall for the Shakespeare conspiracy theories are those, like our beloved Emile, who could not or cannot believe that an individual not from the upper classes could have become the greatest writer in Western literature.

Stlukes', were you to read my last post on this thread, you would find that I believe Shakespeare probably was the author of the plays.
I have posted enough times for you to know that it's Emil rather than Emile: lack of attention to detail tends to undermine a given stance on this or any other serious discussion on Litnet.

[Poetaster]

To be honest, I find the Shakespeare authorship question amusing but ultimately silly. I'm convinced beyond more than doubt that Will Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him.